How to Unpublish Pages in Sitecore

As marketers, sometimes we create a webpage that’s not yet ready for “prime time.” Or sometimes we don’t want a page that’s been published to appear on the front-end of our website any longer (like pages promoting expired quarterly marketing campaigns, for example). Both of these wants can be easily satisfied with a few simple steps in the Sitecore CMS.

Six Steps To Unpublish a Page in Sitecore

Step 1: Log in to Sitecore.

Step 2: Navigate through the tree structure and find the page you’d like to unpublish.

Step 3: On the right side of the CMS, scroll down until you come to the “Publishing” section of the page.

Step 4a: If the page has already been published and indexed (a quick way to determine that is to run a page index search in Google by adding the url in question after “site: “in the Google search bar) you’ll want to set up a 301 redirect to another related page so that anyone missing it will find another (hopefully just as vaulable) page. This will also avoid those dreaded 404 redirect notifications from Google or Bing Webmaster Tools and help maintain a healthy site from an SEO perspective.

Step 5: Save, and Publish (seems counter-intuitive to “Publish” to “Unpublish,” but that’s how it is with a CMS sometimes, people).

Step 6: Confirm page has been unpublished by navigating to it on the front-end. If you’ve set up a redirect (see below), this is when you would also review that.

Speaking of redirects, to make it easier to set up redirects in Sitecore, our Developer “Chef” Darney offers some developer tips on how to create customized 302/301 redirect pages – so that marketers like us can set them up without needing dev guidance. Handy!

Follow these six simple steps to take your page off a Sitecore-driven website, and keep things cool in the land of SEO. Happy Unpublishing!